Comment Yup (Score 1) 294
I'm going on my 15th year at Microsoft. The first three were spent in Redmond. The rest have been at the office in Fargo, ND. For family reasons, I asked to be xferred to Fargo.
These days, not only do I not want to work in Redmond, I would prefer to not regularly go to a company office at all. Last year, I moved to a farmstead that is a bit outside of town. I've been working from home irregularly -- a few days here and there. Now that I have a new boss who is in Redmond, he doesn't care if I'm a remote employee in a Fargo office or a remote employee in my basement. So, I expect to be doing quite a bit more WFH.
It turns out that I am way more individually productive at completing tasks from home than I am when I am in the office.
However, there are definite advantages to getting some face to face time with the people you regularly work with. But not every day.
Every few months, Google, Netflix, Salesforce,etc will grab my linked in profile and ask if I'm interested. I tell them all the same thing - there is no condition under which I would move to the Bay Area. None at all. Furthermore, these companies are all based off of opensource software that was developed via distributed engineering - so what's their excuse to want to co-locate people into offices? Surely it isn't an engineering reason? Surely what they're building isn't more complicated than the linux kernel?
When something happens to my MS job out here, I plan on taking a 50% pay cut when I find whatever is next. That's not ideal, but I'm not willing to move to a big urban area again. There are people who are competent software engineers that don't want to live in large cities, or who don't want to commute to an office even if they do live in a large city. We're affordable to hire, we incur no facilities costs, and we're appreciative and loyal. Stop overlooking us.
Corporate culture is behind social and technical culture. Most of us interact daily with acquantances that live multiple timezones away. The reasons for forcing co-workers into the same building every day continue to shrink. It will be great when cube farms are levelled and other more interesting things are built in their place.